Startup Systems

It’s all about the learning. And mediocre successes don’t give you any learning.

Momentum is Everything

Most founders implicitly realize that in order to get a startup off the ground you need to will it into existence and keep momentum high.

This is good for the startup but it’s also essential for the founder — when momentum is high most founders feel more optimistic about what they’re building, which is obvious to anyone they’re... See more

“Why didn’t they simply do the perfect thing on the first attempt?”

The short answer is: that’s not how this works. Things are not linear or clean. We can only asymptote towards perfection through trial and error.

First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly possibl... See more

Killer utility theory argues that the more general-purpose a device, the less individual applications matter and the more important hardware differentiation becomes. It is the collective killer utility of all the apps that matter, not the existence of one killer app. Consumers buy an Xbox solely for gaming and, for many, solely for Halo (at least, ... See more

I like to say the devils and the details and the devils and how you execute. And so coming back to how do we execute just a little bit differently and some of the learnings there where I think the first time we started growth, we could have been more user-centric and been a lot more hypothesis driven. We were following a lot of best practices that ... See more